France’s competition regulator today issued a fine of 500 million euros, or about $593 million, to Google LLC after finding that the search giant has failed to comply with parts of a 2020 antitrust ruling.

The antitrust ruling ruling focused on the way Google displays content from news publishers in search results. The company said in a statement today that “the fine ignores our efforts to reach an agreement, and the reality of how news works on our platforms.”

In April 2020, French authorities ordered Google to pay publishers whose content it displays in its search engine and other products. The manner in which the company must do so was specified in a series of injunctions known as the interim measures.

France’s competition regulator, the Autorité de la concurrence, said today that Google breached four of the injunctions issued as part of the order. Among them is an injunction that instructed the search giant to “negotiate in good faith” with the publishers whom it was ordered to pay for the right to display their content in search results.

Officials have found that Google breached the obligation to negotiate in good faith on several occasions. First, the company didn’t negotiate with publishers that don’t have a so-called Political and General Information certification. Google was moreover found to have told two press agencies, AFP and the Fédération Française des Agences de Presse, that “they could not benefit from being remunerated for their content taken over by third-party publishers in their publications,” the Autorité de la concurrence stated. 

The competition regulator also found that Google had imposed unfair conditions on the publishers with whom it did negotiate. In discussions to determine the fee publishers should be paid for content, the company is said to have limited the scope of the negotiations to focus only on ad revenue from Google Search pages and excluded revenue from other Google services. It additionally “unilaterally imposed that discussions with publishers and AFP focus on a global partnership called Showcase,” according to the the Autorité de la concurrence.

Showcase is a service similar to Google News that the search giant debuted last year. The service, which is still in the process of rolling out, enables publishers to display news to users via so-called story panels in Google Search and several of the company’s other products. The story panels enable publishers to customize how their content shows up for consumers to a greater extent than they could before.

“Google’s negotiations with press publishers and agencies cannot be regarded as having been conducted in good faith, while Google imposed that the discussions necessarily take place within the framework of a new partnership, called Publisher Curated News, which included a new service called Showcase,” Autorité de la concurrence President Isabelle de Silva said in a statement. “In doing so, Google refused, as it has been asked on several occasions, to have a specific discussion on the remuneration due for current uses of content protected by related rights.”

The regulator found that Google’s decision to link the content payment negotiations to Showcase also breached two of the other injunctions issued against the company as part of the original 2020 antitrust case. That, too, factored into today’s fine. 

The last of the four injunctions Google was found to have breached relates to the way it shared data with publishers during the talks. At the time of the original antitrust ruling, Google was ordered to give news publishers and press agencies the information they need  to make a “transparent evaluation of the remuneration due” to them for their content. 

Autorité de la concurrence determined that Google sent some of the necessary information “barely a few days before the end of the deadline set by the injunction.” Furthermore, the search giant is believed to have made it difficult for smaller publishers to “make the link between Google’s use of protected content, the income it derives from it and its overall financial proposals.”

In addition to the $593 million fine, the competition regulator today ordered Google to present publishers with new proposals for licensing their content within two months. If the proposals are not submitted within two months, Google could face additional fines of up to 900,000 euros per day, the equivalent of about $1.065 million.

“We are very disappointed with this decision — we have acted in good faith throughout the entire process,” Google said in a statement today. “The fine ignores our efforts to reach an agreement, and the reality of how news works on our platforms. To date, Google is the only company to have announced agreements on neighboring rights.”

A Google spokesperson told Politico that the company is close to finalizing a deal with AFP, one of the news agencies mentioned in the Autorité de la concurrence’s announcement of the fine today. Google previously reached content licensing agreements with several prominent French news outlets, including Le Monde, L’Obs and Le Figaro. 

Photo: Unsplash